


Necromancy and Other Void Navigation Tactics

by ductish



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 15:20:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9390701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ductish/pseuds/ductish
Summary: The Doctor needs another Time Lord to open the breech to the parallel world. Luckily, he’s found one. Unluckily, he’d just been shot by his human wife.





	

The Master protested vivaciously the first three weeks of detainment.

The Doctor, in the meantime, worked on recalibrating the time defibrilating rebustler.

Only after that was done (and the TARDIS was in proper Vortex-navigating condition again) did the Doctor move to the pressing matter at hand: installing a Time-Lord-silencing frequency to the sonic screwdriver, or, thereafter, setting 458b. From then on, whenever the Master raved about world domination, spun symphonies on his loathing for the Doctor, and/or attempted to wheedle away the remote to the holo-screen, the Doctor could simply aim the sonic with this trusty setting at the ready and the Master was left gulping the air like a particularly furious fish. The Doctor, satisfied, would pocket the screwdriver with a whirl, the Master would scowl, the Doctor would grin, and eventually it would all wear off and begin again.

This is what happened for eight human months straight. It was not too long of a time, really, considering the Master had recently kept the Doctor under lock and key for twelve months while attempting to destroy the universe. For that reason the Doctor tried not to have it in him to be sorry for the Master, though sometimes he did relinquish the holo-remote, begrudgingly.

That eight months took eight months was the fault of the Master—of course. The TARDIS had acquired an astonishing amount of of tricky, sensitive repairs to make during the time she’d sustained the paradox, and even after getting to all those, it took the Doctor another two months to flit all around the universe to haggle over the various scraggly bits she needed for upgrades.

The Master, by a rather shortcoming means of apology, would only say, disgustedly: “All this for a human. What a waste.”

 

 

The Doctor had kept so busy in all this time, delicately babying the TARDIS into even better shape than she had been before the year that never was, that he quite forgot he had raised the Master from the dead for a reason. And the Master, of course, detested the Doctor (and his generous use of setting 458b), so convincing him to help proved to be a new level of tricky.

The Doctor’s first approach was to take the Master to a number of planets he thought the Master might enjoy: not planets with oddball shops and markets, as Donna would have preferred; not run-for-your-lives-and-end-up-in-jail planets, as Rose would have preferred (the Master would have liked those as well, but the Doctor wasn’t confident of his ability to keep him detained); and not even planets with particularly wonky alien technology, as Martha would have preferred. No, he took the Master to innocent and intellectual places. To places stirring with architectural history and devious underplots and political skirmishes that one could hardly sense unless one were accustomed to seeing things in a rather nefarious light.

He took the Master to places that reminded them both of Gallifrey (these, it turned out, neither of them much enjoyed, partially because of guilt and loneliness and sadness, and partially because places similar to Gallifrey tended to be stodgy, dry, and boring, and it reminded them both why they left in the first place).

In the end, the Doctor even allowed the Master to stir up galactic trouble hefty enough that that local military imprisoned the Master and scheduled him for a dawn decapitation.

That was the Doctor’s last straw.

“That’s enough,” he thundered to the Master, after wiggling through four slimy sewer systems and shuffling wetly through His Majesty of Thorndakle’s harem of amphibious wives just to break the Master out of his cell. “You wouldn’t survive a decapitation, you know, and then where would I be? Have you ever done a non-selfish thing in your life? After all we’ve been through, last Time Lords in the universe.”

The Master sulked, but as ever valued his own life above all else, and he followed the Doctor back through the sewers and onto the TARDIS, which had somehow telepathically devised of their situation and had fashioned a slide right inside the doors that made the Doctor and the Master tumble in an ungracious pile to the large shower pit at the bottom.

“Have you had enough now?” the Doctor said severely to the Master, while scrubbing his own armpits with a pink loofa and passing the Master the (rather direly needed) anti-dandruff shampoo. “Are you ready to help now, or what?”

“I wouldn’t help you if you were the last Time Lord in the universe,” spat the Master, his arms contorted over his head as he tried to scrub the top part of his back. He paused. “Literally, in fact. Besides, I haven’t forgotten how you shackled me to the media room and made me watch twenty-first century human dramas for hours with you.”

The Doctor said, “I’m a Time Lord; I don’t watch human dramas. I was researching, taking notes. Rose used to watch them, and now we’re going to collect her, I don’t want to have fallen behind not know what she’s talking about.”

“Disgusting,” said the Master, sincerely. “You’re a proper kept pet. After all this time, I knew you were pathetic, but this—ha! If they could see you now.”

The Doctor sniffed and chose to ignore that in favor of: “So? Well? Have you decided to help? I’ve already gotten everything ready, you know, all the Void preparations are made. All we’ve got to do is have two of us at the console.”

“I wouldn’t help you even if you offered me my very own TARDIS!” the Master said passionately. “And, besides, this ship isn’t near Void-ready. No wonder you crash us everywhere; you’re hopeless. I bet it makes you wish you’d not thrown out the manual like an overpassioned ninny.”

“It is Void-ready. I went through all the equations in my quite impressive brain all that last year with you!” said the Doctor. “I’ve thought of every last possibility.”

The Master, now on to scrubbing his feet with a flagrantly purple sponge that was once a snail-like creature from Oarindx, giggled in a way he knew would incise the Doctor. “Not the way I see it.”

The Doctor glowered at him, looking a bit like a drowned Markindewl, what with his overly dainty nose and the misshaped eyebrows and really rather tiny lips, but didn’t say anything. The Master waited until, unable to resist, he shouted,

“How do you expect to pass through the space-time continuum and make it through the Void without having added the third Voroxium knut to the zigzag plotter!”

The Doctor froze, and his eyes opened very wide, and all of the sudden he took off like a shot to the console room, flapping around nakedly and creating great big puddles all down the hallway.

“Really?” said the Master. He fetched a mop to clean it all up. Luckily the Doctor had stolen this TARDIS so many centuries ago, he thought, because with that attitude who would have ever wanted to actually give him a TARDIS?

Work done, the Master wandered up to the console room to find the Doctor with his ridiculous shoes dangling from outside a hole in the ceiling. The idiot hadn’t even gotten himself a proper ladder, but had launched himself up from the main console to get there. There were footprints on the monitors.

“Ugh,” the Master thought, “Love. This is disgusting, if this is what people do for each other for love. Completely absurd. We could be spending our time taking over worlds, collapsing monarchies, spreading false prophesies all around the cosmos! But we’re here, because of your sullen adolescent fancies.”

The Doctor garbled something unintelligible from on the other side of the ceiling panel, and then dropped out, landing rather ungracefully on his backside. The Master laughed. The Doctor hopped back up, face glowing, beaming, almost, and the Master’s laugh halted as he went right back to glowering. Such happiness. Such effervescence. It could hardly be borne.

“Well?” said the Doctor, racing around the console like an excited puppy. The Master mimicked the movements, pulling first at the chronometric astrometer to make sure it was at the right levels. He, of course, danced in a completely sane way. “Allons-y! Into the Void! Ha!”

And so the last two Time Lords in the universe (this universe, at any rate, and probably any universe) danced their way into the Void, one following an soppy pathway to the human ape he happened to have fallen in love with, and the other, unable to resist the challenge of navigating a non-Void ship through the Void.

Yes. Just a challenge. The pleasure of scientific accomplishment was worth it, the Master decided, even if it was helping the Doctor out, a bit.

Smoke billowed and the cloister bell bellowed. The TARDIS shrieked in their minds, rather reflecting the mood of the Doctor, it seemed, as the shriek seemed equal in terror and exhilaration and an undercurrent of _at last_.

When they landed they landed sideways. Both of them immediately began shouting at one another.

“I thought you said you already replaced the lateral balance cones!” the Master accused the Doctor. “That was clearly shoddy work; we nearly flew out of the Vortex no less than seventeen times!”

“Well I don’t know who taught you to use the hand break, because that's the worst I’ve ever seen!” the Doctor told him. “You nearly had us upside down and in the fourteenth century, and what good would that do, with a TARDIS that can’t fly here. We’d have been stuck waiting another six or seven centuries!”

Aghast, the Master said, “No we wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have us do that. That would be absurd! We’d be nearly middle-aged by that point! We’d have given up and gone back to universe prime, that’s what we would have done.”

But the Doctor had a look on his face, a lovesick, determined look, and the Master suddenly worried about what he had got himself into.

“Look,” he said, uneasily, and then with growing inspiration. “Maybe it’s time we parted ways, eh? I’ll fly the TARDIS back, keep her safe for you, and you can stay here with your human. I promise to keep universal disaster on the other side of the Void: no bother to you! I’ll avoid paradoxes and chrono traps, even. Only bourgeoisie mayhem for me. What do you say, eh? You can play human with your pet, live out the domestic life.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Doctor told him. “You can’t just leave; Rose will want to meet the person who got me back to Pete’s world in the first place.” He gave the Master a sidelong look. “And she’ll want to meet the person who singularly brought unparalleled destruction unto her home planet. Better watch out, because if that slap is inherited, you’re in for a fuzzy head.”

“What?” said the Master, but the Doctor merely leveled a huge, concerning grin at him and bolted out the door with his stupid coat. The Master, waffling between grand theft auto, waiting, or seeing the next development in this entirely mawkish show, decided he might as well see what all the to-do was about.

When the Doctor popped out of the TARDIS doors (with a bit difficulty, since the landing had shifted the gravitational center, such that his feet were actually facing the sky and he fell rather gracelessly onto the dirt when exiting), he was ecstatic to find himself immediately face-to-face with a Vitex branding board.

“You can trust me,” he recited manically to the Master crawling out behind him. The Doctor put his thumb up and ignored the nasty scowl the Master directed toward him. “HA! We’re here! We made it! Look, look at that zeppelin. These humans, _oh_ , they’re brilliant.”

Then it was only a matter of tracking down a car (which slowed courtesy of the Master jumping—or being pushed, just very lightly, in front of it, and did the Doctor mention how awful that year that never was had been?) and convincing the driver that they were on official royal business and had to commandeer a vehicle immediately, post-haste. It was only after they left the bewildered pizza driver on the side of the road that the Doctor remembered that Pete’s world had a President, not a Prime Minister, and who even knew if they maintained the monarchy.

Oh, well! He thought to himself, poking his head out the dilapidated Volvo window as it sputtered on. What did it matter! He had transport!

“Hang on,” said the Master, in that moment a baffling voice of reason, “Don’t you suppose we ought to stop for a bit and check out the date? What happens if your pet is ninety-eight years old? Or has eight whelps by now? You should check out these things, you know; this is precisely why you should go into these things with a plan.”

The Doctor scoffed. “Of course we’re in the right time period,” he said. “The TARDIS was programmed to take us here, right after Bad Wolf Bay.”

He left it at that—typical, thought the Master sourly; the Doctor always did fancy dropping information and expecting people to just pick up on muddled context; he supposed "Bad Wolf Bay" was love-code for something grossly human—and the Master didn’t bother asking for explanation, because he was too busy holding onto dear life to the side of the car door as the Doctor screeched their primitive Earth vehicle straight into a security gate.

“Watch it; we don’t all have regenerations left!” snarked the Master to the Doctor’s empty seat. He had already vaulted out of the door and was fiddling with his sonic with the electrical box that controlled the opening of the gate.

Success was heralded by a buzzing sound and a pained rasp from the gate, which was too crunched into the front of the car to move very well at this point, but the Doctor appeared not to notice. He was staring at a point beyond their commandeered vehicle. The Master turned to look.

Another car was turning into the driveway. It was large and black, and that was about as far as the Master could surmise from human transportation vessels. The Doctor, though—the Doctor stared at the car as though it were the most shocking, wonderful thing he had ever seen. The Master had never seen him look like that before.

The Doctor’s arms settled by his sides, quite without purpose or plan, because he was too distracted to think about what his body parts were doing. The windows were tinted, but he knew—he knew—it had to be Rose in there. Rose, and Jackie, and Mickey, and Pete—and—and Rose.

The Doctor suddenly wondered what he was doing. It had been only hours for her. Surely it would be better to stay here. Surely she would regret it if she didn't.

This was a mistake, the Doctor thought, dimly, horrified.

But then the SUV stopped, and he stopped thinking.

 

 

The human that got out of the car wasn’t bad looking, the Master supposed. Blonde, like Lucy, and who would have thought that the Master’s tastes would have coincided so awkwardly with the Doctor’s? But this girl’s hair looked much more obviously artificial, as though it were purposeful. And she looked otherwise rather worse for wear, her eyes red and her skin unfortunately splotchy.

She stared at the Doctor as though she had seen a ghost. A wonderful, unbelievable ghost.

And clearly they were a perfect match for one another, because then, then, at the height of their joyful reunion— _neither of the two idiots moved_.

The Master thought this was the worst thing he had ever invested for in his lives. All this trouble, and the blundering fools were silent. He felt well cheated, and strongly as though he needed to intervene, perhaps by causing some kind of explosion.

And then the Doctor smiled. It broke upon his face like a bloom, uncontrolled and vast and confusingly young.

“Hello,” he said, quite stupidly, the Master thought, but the human seemed to think it was the best thing she had ever heard, and after taking a moment to break out herself in a beam toward the Doctor, she echoed back in a voice that was thick and heavily accented and quite overcome:

“ _Hello_.”

“They deserve each other,” the Master sighed to himself, still disappointed. Even as he thought this, Rose Tyler, the terror of two universes, if only because of what action she could inspire, was stepping timorously forward, and so was the Doctor, and somehow they lurched inelegantly into a hug that was depressingly chaste up until it wasn’t.

“Ugh,” said the Master, wrinkling his nose as the human pressed her wet nose into the Doctor’s neck and he drew back with trailing fingers firm in her hair, pressing his lips to her chin, the corner of her mouth, her smile.

“Ugh,” the three humans that had followed Rose out of the car seemed to be thinking as well, except not all that much, really. The older blonde one had her palms pressed to her face, looking traumatized and weepy; and the younger man looked tired, and only mildly unhappy at the display; and the older man looked rather like he didn’t know what to think, but that he definitely had noticed the front gate’s destruction and he was not happy about that.

“Did you miss me?” the Master heard the Doctor say, as though he were trying to be funny and pretend he hadn’t just spent the better part of the last few years making plans that could have resulted in universal implosion. It was like watching a romance play out between eighty-year-old Time Tots; the Master felt thoroughly embarrassed for him.

But Rose just smiled. She touched her fingers—a little bit wide, blunt, not long and clever like Lucy’s, the Master couldn’t help criticizing—she touched her fingers to his lips and smiled a quirky, lopsided, oddly charming smile at him.

She laughed. “Yes, Doctor,” was all she said, looking at the Doctor as though she could see the time he spent looking and grieving and pushing, pushing, pushing back the hope that good things could come to him, too.

 

 

Later, when they all gathered around toast and microwaved canned beans (because apparently coming into a sudden windfall of money hadn’t changed the human women’s taste for bad British food), and when the Master had successfully managed to teach the youngest Tyler to volley spitballs in the oblivious Doctor’s ridiculous hair, and when Rose managed to let go of the Doctor’s hand for more than sixty seconds at a time—later, they discussed how it had all come to fruition.

“How did you do it, then?” was what the human mother said.

The Master opened his mouth, and the Doctor, quick to self-preserve even when punch-drunk with love, interrupted hurriedly,

“Er, you know. A little bit of maths, a little bit of jiggery-pokery—”

“—And necromancy,” said the Master. “And a vengeful wife, a deranged business man, some mediocre medical tech—”

Rose looked horrified, though still besotted. So did the Doctor. The Master cackled.


End file.
